If there is/was a designer, what form does/did it have? We have mentioned the
possibility of a giant physical being (or maybe several beings) that could take the
Earth in the palm of its hand. The universe itself may be a body or bodies. But there is
also the possibility of a totally different form of life that we are unable to perceive –
what people call the spirit world. Fantasy? Maybe, but remember that any explanation
we come up with will seem fantastic – none more so than the faith that total
unconsciousness could randomly create consciousness.

Is there any evidence of a different form of life? It depends what you mean by
"evidence". Thousands if not millions of people down through the ages have reported
seeing ghosts. There are people who say they have made contact with the dead, or
have lived before. Others claim to have special powers: healers, clairvoyants,
telepaths, prophets, mediums. Is every single one of these a fake, or a self-deluder? You only need one genuine case to show that there are forms and forces of life
beyond those that we know. In my wife's family (she comes from Nigeria) a child
died and another was born soon after. The second child, while still an infant, recalled
scenes from the dead child's life that he could not possibly have known from his own
childhood. I myself, when living in Ghana, where I spent four years, saw a boy cut
himself with broken glass and not bleed, and thrust his hand into the fire and not burn.
At the time he was under the influence of a juju. What we regard as supernatural
belongs to everyday life in parts of Africa. The atheistic scientist may scoff but, as we
have seen, science is not equipped to explain such phenomena. (In The God Delusion,
Dawkins does not even scoff. He does not mention psychic phenomena at all.) The
agnostic remains open-minded. He has to acknowledge that there may be genuine
cases of all the above.

What, then, would this imply about our maker? If it is/was not a physical being, it
is/was a so-called spiritual being. This may seem to contradict the image of the
scientist manipulating his materials, but once we take the step of acknowledging
spiritual powers, we must acknowledge telekinesis. A ‘spirit’ can move an object. I
hesitate to call it a mind, since that is so closely associated with the brain, but ‘spirit’
too has unwanted associations. Some would use the word ‘soul’, but it sounds too
religious. I will stick to ‘spirit’.

If the designer is/was a physical being, either it has departed, or it is still there but
we have failed to recognize it as such with our scientific instruments. Perhaps it is
simply too big for us to discern its shape. Or perhaps it exists in another dimension.
String theory and superstring theory suggest that there may be as many as 10 or 11
dimensions, compared to the meagre four that we are aware of. If, however, the
designer is/was a spiritual being, we can only recognize it through our own spirit – the
mental powers encased within our brains. Some scientists will inevitably argue that
when the brain dies, the mental powers die (“inevitably” because science is only
equipped to deal with the physical world), but your ghosts and your mediums suggest
otherwise. Once again, the design may reflect the designer, and may take the form of
a spirit.

Does the spirit die? The question sounds theological, but that is because of the word
itself. Try to strip it of its associations, and instead concentrate on the idea that it is a
form of life different from the physical one we know. Perhaps this will be easier if we
take a physical analogy. When we look at each other, what we see is the person who
existed one five-hundred-millionth of a second ago. When we look at a star that is
186,281 miles away, we see it as it was one second ago. If I had a telescope that could
focus on an object 660 million miles away, I would see it as it was an hour ago. The
greater the distance, the further back into the past we can see. Modern technology is
working on this even as I write and as you read. We can already see things millions of
light years away. Theoretically, it means that nothing is lost so long as light is able to
travel. A telescope on a planet X billion miles away would enable the observer to
watch the crucifixion. There are, then, waves that go on for ever.

I am not saying that the spirit goes on for ever. I am an agnostic, and I do not know.
I am saying that it is a possibility. That is all we can ever say if we are not able to take
the leap of irrational faith which endows atheists and religious believers with their
certainty. And so, if it is a possibility, we should examine its implications for
ourselves (which we shall do in the next chapter) and for our designer. The designer
may or may not live for ever, but what seems more likely than not is that it lived or
will live a great deal longer than us. The formation of the Earth took aeons, and the
idea that the designer rattled off the whole mechanism of life within, say, seventy
years (let alone six days) doesn’t fit in very well with any conceivable motive for
making the design in the first place. On the analogy of the designer reflecting the
image of the design, one can’t help feeling that it would have wanted to see the
outcome of its work. Whether conscious existence was planned from the start, or
came about after much experimentation, or evolved gradually from increasing levels
of consciousness sparked off by a mutation (deliberate or accidental), the scientific
fact remains that it followed on from millions of years of pretty basic stuff: birth,
survival by various means, reproduction, death. There is no fossil record of amoebas
or dinosaurs having built churches, or having come up with any new technology to
master the natural world, or having mounted a challenge to the very existence of the
designer. If the latter’s purpose was to provide itself with entertainment, it is unlikely
to have walked away before the most exciting twists in the tale (assuming it knew
what exciting possibilities it had created), or to have done its work in such a way that
it would die before seeing them. What seems most probable is that the observer will
stay on till the end of the story.

We are therefore left with the following choices: 1) the unbelievable creative genius
of pure chance (= atheism); 2) a physical designer which we cannot see, either
because it is dead, has gone away to another part of the universe, or is unrecognizable
to our perception; 3) a spirit designer with the same qualifications – dead, gone away,
or unperceivable (the ‘spirit’, remember, being a word for some other, non-corporeal
form of life). In the second and third scenarios, we must assume that the designer had
some sort of motivation for its work, and this seems likely to have involved interest in
the outcome. We can’t measure the time scale by our own standards – the designer’s
scale runs into millions of years. As the hymn puts it: “A thousand ages in thy sight /
are but an evening gone.” In that case, it seems unlikely (that is as far as one can go in
one’s speculations) that in the short time humans have been on the Earth, the designer
would have got fed up with the whole thing and packed its bags.

There is no comfort in any of this. Nobody likes being under surveillance, and the
idea that some mighty power is watching every move is thoroughly off-putting. So too
is the idea that this power couldn’t care less what happens to us. So too is the idea that
we are entirely on our own, at the mercy of the random catastrophes we are exposed
to. So too is the idea that we are only there as entertainment, and our suffering is part
of the performing rights. So too, if we take the two possibilities open to ourselves, are
the prospects of eternal death and eternal life, but we shall look at these later. For the
moment, it is the designer and not the design on which we are focusing, and for the
moment what we see is both frightening and depressing. Religion is no help at all. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart," commands Jesus (Matthew 22, 37). "Fear God," says Peter, his disciple (1st Epistle General, 2, 17). Can we love what we fear? Imagine being told by your father: “Love me, or I’ll beat you to a
pulp.” But we are a long way from exhausting the possibilities of our scenarios. The
designer, after all, is infinitely cleverer than we are, and since it has been able to
create such a vast variety of patterns, it is not unreasonable to assume that it has
plenty more tricks up its sleeve.